£135m spent on planning for ditched M4 relief road is written off

MILLIONS of pounds which were spent on the scrapped M4 relief road have been formally written off, ending any remaining hope that the project might go ahead.

The remaining £78.9m costs of the relief road were written down by the Welsh Government last week. It comes after £43.1m spent on the project was written off the previous year.

A total of £135.7m in taxpayers’ money has been spent on the relief road plan, which would have seen a new road built to alleviate traffic congestion near the Brynglas Tunnels.

The money spent included development work like “environmental surveys, ground investigation data and transport models”.

The road was officially scrapped in June 2019 after years of political wrangling, delays, disagreements over cost and environmental concerns.

While there had been some hope among supporters of the road that the government could revisit the project, the government has ruled the millions of pounds spent on the work now has no immediate use and will be filed away until further notice, a further indication that it has no intention to revisit the road.

However, the Welsh Government said this does not mean the work already carried out will never be used, insisting it “shall be referred to in future projects to maximise value to the public purse”.

The estimated cost of the road, which was first proposed back in 1991, before the Welsh Government even existed, had ballooned to £1.3bn by the time First Minister Mark Drakeford announced it would not go ahead.

A Welsh Government statement said the decision to write down the remaining money for the project would be included in its accounts for 2020/21.

The debate over the road has continued since it was cancelled.

In March, the Newport Conservatives tabled a motion in Newport City Council asking for a referendum to be held in the city on whether or not to build the road.

A watered-down motion asking the Welsh Government to “carefully consider” a referendum on the issue was later passed.

It even stoked tensions between England and Wales, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledging to try to take forward the project, prompting a rebuttal from the Welsh Government stating that he has “no say in the M4 relief road”.

Earlier this year the planning protection for the proposed route, which had been in place for 25 years to prevent other developments being built where the road could have been, was removed.

But the need to address traffic concerns in Newport has not gone away, and the road became a key issue in the recent elections in May.

The South East Wales Transport Commission, which was appointed by the government to examine possible alternatives to ease congestion in the area, recommended in November 2020 that six new railway stations be built between Cardiff and Newport.